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The Judge and the Old Lady

Mrs. Jones was over eighty, but she still drove her old car like a woman half her age. She loved driving very fast, and boasted of the fact that she had never, in her thirty-five years of driving, been punished for a driving offence.
Then one day she nearly lost her record. A police car followed her, and the policemen in it saw her pass a red light without stopping.
When Mrs. Jones came before the judge, he looked at her severely and said that she was too old to drive a car, and that the reason why she had not stopped at the red light was most probably that her eyes had become weak with old age, so that she had simply not seen it.
When the judge had finished what he was saying, Mrs. Jones opened the big handbag she was carrying and took out her sewing. Without saying a word, she chose a needle with a very small eye, and threaded it at her first attempt.
When she had successfully done this, she took the thread out of the needle again and handed both the needle and the thread to the judge, saying, "Now it is your turn. I suppose you drive a car, and that you have no doubts about your own eyesight".
The judge took the needle and tried to thread it. After half a dozen attempts, he had still not succeeded. The case against Mrs. Jones was dismissed, and her record remained unbroken.

Vocabulary
- a driving offence: une contravention
- to dismiss a case: classer une affaire.